Ciudades (Jun 2008)
Replanteando el futuro de la ciudad americana: ¿hacia una agenda de habitabilidad?
Abstract
This article reflects on the efforts made in the United States during the past forty years in creating a system of urban and regional planning based on utilizing quality-of-life indicators as the guiding logic, followed by a second period of planning efforts marked by the new concerns with attaining greater compliance with goals and implementation strategies that center on the idea of sustainable urban and regional planning. While there are significant differences in the level of quality-of-life achieved by different regions throughout the county, it is clear that the physical character and quality-of-life in many North American cities have improved considerably. Yet, this achievement has manifested in a vast increase in the consumption of land and non-renewable resources. It is evident that the movement toward a sustainable urbanism, despite its colloquial acceptability, has produced minimal results in the country at large. The path toward a sustainable urbanism based on implementing sound planning and land use policies has not been able to surpass the general social apathy to change the individual and collective attitudes inherent in our cultural life styles. The new call for the 21st century is based on new measures of achieving a level of livability --a sustainable quality-of-life based on a widespread and well informed public involvement that assume the responsibility to, and the possibility of, changing our existing life styles demanding better urban and regional planning models that are fitting with the necessities of curving significantly our ecological footprint as presently utilized.
